“Community” contested, imagined, and performed: Cultural performance, contestation, and community in an organized‐labor social drama

Abstract

Community means different things to different people, and one productive way to explore community is by approaching it as imagined, and contested. Competing views of community are inscribed and enacted in cultural performances. Using the 1936–37 Flint, Michigan, autoworkers' sitdown strike as case study, this essay outlines a framework for analyzing and describing the ways in which specific cultural performances negotiate communal identity politics.